Published October 23, 2005 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
Kids today keep schedules just as complicated as those of their parents. From reveille to lights out, young people face a precarious balance of school, sports, extracurricular activities and jobs.
Even little kids who can’t pronounce “Palm Pilot” have Palm Pilots, so they can tell you about “scheduwing confwicts.”
When I was a kid I remember spending hours bouncing tennis balls off a wall and pondering nothing in particular. The way things are going, my infant son Henry’s first words might be: “These bills!” He’s already taking his morning bottle of coffee black. By Christmas, he could be smoking Marbs two at a time.
Of course, I’m kidding. Babies should only smoke if they’re dieting, and most doctors insist that children add a sweetened cream to their coffee to ease their transition to Mountain Dew.
I don’t think kids are any different these days than they were a generation ago, but their parents are. If junior isn’t achieving something vastly more significant than his or her peers, he or she is “behind.” As a result, many companies target parental ambitions in their marketing techniques.
One such example would have to be a TV commercial I saw the other day. Are you tired of your kids playing video games and goofing off on the computer all the time? Do you wish they would do their chores and acknowledge the existence of other people in the house? There’s an answer – “Power Cop!”
Power Cop is a device that automatically shuts off things like televisions, computers and video game consoles after a certain amount of time or at certain times of day, thus forcing children to reckon with the harsh tonic of reality.
In the ad, parents tell their kids to come down to dinner, and the kids say “just 15 more minutes” as they continue playing video games. The parents shrug. For them, the only way to stop the kids is to buy a thing that will shut off the TV on the parent’s behalf. Hello, passive aggressive? “We’ll have to ask the robot if you can have candy for breakfast … oh. I see. The robot says no.”
The closing slogan of the ad frustrated me the most: “Give your kids the time they deserve.” In other words, the sellers of this product firmly believe that their little black box will free up time in your kids schedule for work on a perpetual motion machine and/or Ivy League entrance essay. Yeah, good luck with that. Between homework and a burning tool shed, I’m betting on burning tool shed.
Not to worry kids, you see the best part of this for you is that the same TV ad explains how to disable the Power Cop when parents want to watch mindless television programs or use the computer. So really, the only things kids learn is to model hypocrisy and entrust technology to shape one’s core values. I swear, some days it feels like we’re about five years from “Soylent Green.” (You know, humans as food).
I’ll spare you the lecture about how parents can replicate the actions of Power Cop by actually turning off the television themselves, and holding their kids responsible if they break the rules. Besides, I wouldn’t want Power Cop to show up at the house and turn off my water heater so my shower got really cold.
It’s true that kids see more distracting electronic devices than ever before, and that these things can interfere with their relentlessly growing list of responsibilities. But every kid – and every adult for that matter – gets the same amount of time in a day. What you do with that time has less do with the little box sitting on top of the TV and more do with the person sitting on the couch.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.